The Unreasonable Man

(Port Credit, ON, taken while the plane was turning downwind for RW06 at YYZ)

I am back from Hong Kong, where I was struck by the number of digital signage screens. Look at this giant one on a building: that AIG sign is a huge LED screen, with a moving message, visible from Kowloon:

Even better, some buildings themselves are signs. The New World Centre in Kowloon is itself a giant sign, using LED strips mounted vertically across the building. The scrolling message was “I Love TSTE” - the sign is great, the message less so (how am I supposed to know that TSTE means Tsim Sha Tsui East”?)

The following are unnecessary and use environmental resources, and should therefore have punitive taxes slapped on them:

• Plastic bags
• Churches
• Donuts
• Museums
• Electric guitars
• iPods
• Computers
• Hockey

Does all that sound ridiculous?

No more ridiculous than outlawing tungsten lightbulbs and slapping $4,000 taxes on large cars. Environmental hysteria is used as a cheap vote-grabber. People do unnecessary things - that is called culture. Governments should have no say in how people spend their time. I bet outlawing hockey would save a lot more environment than making SUVs $4,000 more expensive, and yet I would never suggest that we outlaw hockey. Some people like to unnecessarily drive their kids to hockey matches; I like to drive an unnecessarily large car.

OK, so I am going to replace my car. I am soliciting opinions. I am looking for another Luxury (4WD or AWD) SUV. So far the two candidates I have left are:

• Another new LR3. Best drive of them all, best off-road capabilities by far; best body stiffness. But utilitarian (not much luxury), “very unreliable” reputation, and totally guzzles gas.
• Mercedes 320 CDI (Diesel). Wonderful engine, lots of torque, sufficient power, and cheap diesel. But bad nav system, silly steering-wheel mounted gear stick, smaller than the LR3, and above all, hard to get (in all of Canada there may be one in Saskatchewan; otherwise this involves a multi-month wait).

Candidates that I think I’ll leave:

• Mercedes 350 (V6 gasoline). Nice. But perhaps too similar to the LR3 and without the power and torque of the V8.
• Range Rover Sport - a dressed up LR3 but smaller, and too expensive.
• BMW X5 (3litre) - drove it today: underpowered, loud straining engine, surprisingly unrefined drive - not nice!
• BMW X5 (4.8 litre) - nice but expensive.
• Mercedes GL - Expensive. Fuel = gas guzzler, or Diesel = underpowered.

So I am willing to spend money on a $70k car and yet there are surprisingly few options.

Opinions?

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, 25 March. (Click for larger).

What are these people selling?

The PC just crashed again. I have had more blue screens now in a month with Vista than in all my years with XP! So much for “the most reliable Windows ever”. Facts speak.

I have also run into the slow copy problem. Copying 4GB of content from a 32x CF card inserted into a PC Card slot takes almost three hours. Literally, three hours. And while you do the copy, Skype refuses to work: the sound is interrupted at roughly a 4 Hz frequency. And this on a Core2 Dual processor PC!

As said, stay clear of this OS unlesss you are patient (I am) or like eye candy. Else, you may want to wait until Service Pack 1 or 2 is released.

And now for a real Vista: a night shot of Hong Kong I made two days ago:

Not TOO bad (click for larger), even though I had to handhold the camera.

I remind myself that Japan is nicely weird: the toilets are like complex machines; the only Western channel on TV is Fox (”24″ is on), JAL was good but super slow (I only saw a stewardess three times, so had just 3 tiny glasses of wine on a 4.5 hour flight); but priority tags on bags actually work here: red tags come out first, then blue, then green. Who’d have thought. It can be done.

By the time anyone normal (meaning people who sleep at night) reads this, I will be on my way to Japan. One night in Tokyo. While I await my flight, it is raining at Honh Kong airport: I am very lucky that yesterday was so good. Visibilty like this is almost unknown in Hong Kong (click for larger):

Yesterday was a real piece of luck, and both the 70-200mm 4L lens (for the image above) and the 17-40 4L lens (below) paid off handsomely.

So now to Japan for a night - the cheap ticket routes me through Japan on JAL and then through Dallas on AA.

This is my last morning in Hong Kong. And I am awake at 5am.

If you have a 1680×1050 display, click above: the full-sized image makes a nice desktop background. Yesterday was a good day for photography, witness the hundreds of people out here with digital SLRs and large lenses.

..is unchanged. especially interesting is the contrast between ordinary:

…and opulent.

Both are available in large quantities here. A few more snaps in the photo album [link]